Why babies can forget about memory

But babies do not learn much else before their first birthday because they have no long-term memory, researchers have found.

A study suggests parents who try to teach their children in their first year of life may be wasting their time.

Trying to instil an early love of classical music, for example, will simply not work as regions of the brain associated with memory are not yet fully developed.

Research at Harvard University in the U.S. found that six-month-old babies can remember something for just 24 hours.

At nine months, they remember events for around a month.

But it is only by the time they are 17 months and older that they start to develop powers of recall over four months or more.

Findings show that the frontal lobe of the brain - the region associated with memory retention and retrieval - doesn't start to mature until the end of the first year.

By the end of the second year it is fully developed, suggests the report in the journal Nature today.

The Harvard team performed simple tasks in front of children aged nine months, 17 and 24 months.

The tasks - such as wiping a table or 'making' a rattle from two toys - were given a name which the psychologists repeated frequently, to encourage the children to remember the name and imitate the tasks.

Prompted with the names, the youngsters were asked to repeat the tasks again four months later.

Those who had seen the tasks at the age of nine months failed to remember them. But the two groups of older children did much better - showing 'robust memory' for the events of four months earlier.

This showed that memory retention developed much more sharply after the first year of a child's life, said the researchers.

Dr Conor Liston said the results dispelled the belief that babies develop memory simply by everyday experience. The ongoing development of their brains as they grow also plays a major part, he said.